Nintendo 3DS StreetPass’ Puzzle Swap Has Been ‘Beaten’ After 13 Years

A community of dedicated Nintendo 3DS Street Pass fans has finally found the rarest puzzle in Puzzle Swap, ANAでDS, after weeks of searching. This means StreetPass Mii Plaza: Puzzle Swap has officially been 100% completed for the first time since its release 13 years ago.

We covered the group’s hunt last week, as for months a small community of Puzzle Swap-lovers has been hunting down every puzzle ever made available for the Street Pass app. That includes several time and region limited puzzles that over the years have become quite rare.

As of June they had found every single puzzle bar one: a rare airplane-themed puzzle that was only available at select airports in Japan for a few months. The group was exhausting every connection they could to find just one person who obtained the puzzle back in the day, at which point a simple file upload would allow the group to share it with the world.

Yesterday, July 3, 2024, someone finally came through. Community leader Benny received an email from an individual containing a friend code and a zip file with the text, “I hope the following information is exactly what you’re looking for.” The community immediately got to work. While the file itself looked promising, they needed the person who sent it to accept a friend request first for the transfer to work. The data also needed to be decrypted and put into a usable format, a process which multiple Discord community members helped with.

Then, at 4:45pm Pacific time, a post:

And moments later:

The Discord erupted. The stranger who had reached out with their puzzle had come through, and at last all 63 Puzzle Swap puzzles had been found and archived. In the following hours, the group worked together to share the puzzle with everyone in the Discord who wanted it, before discussing plans to bundle all 63 puzzles together in one file so that anyone in the future who wants access to them can enjoy.

Here it is, in all its glory:

If you yourself want all the puzzles, you do have to be willing to mod your 3DS. For help with that, we recommend tracking down the community behind the hunt, which has a Twitter, email, and Discord all right here and can help out. But even if accessing the puzzle is only doable via modding, this remains a triumph for game preservation and archiving. It is, to the group’s knowledge, the first time all 63 Puzzle Swap puzzles have been assembled in one place.

So what’s next? It’s tough to say. The community first wants to ensure that all puzzles are readily available to anyone who wants to put in the modding work to obtain them. After that, there’s been some discussion in the group about finding ways to add custom puzzles to Puzzle Swap, or try other modding feats with what the group has learned. But many are content just to have finished the puzzle hunt at all.

“I just want to thank the team for their hard work and everyone else who shared and promoted the search!” Benny said when I asked him for comment. “We are grateful for everyone’s support.”

IGN reached out to the kind stranger who sent Benny the ANA file to try and learn the story behind them picking up the puzzle and finding the hunt years later, but we haven’t heard anything back yet. Thanks, mysterious stranger, whoever you are.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.